'Still Mine': Refusing 'to go gentle into that good night'

The unforced intimacy between James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold as a senior couple in the fact-based "Still Mine" is rare to see in characters of any age. For actors playing a husband in his late eighties and his wife of over sixty years, it's remarkable. Yes, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva were impressive as a similarly aged pair in Michel Haneke's Oscar-winning "Amour."

But their work was, in comparison, cramped and restrained – not because they were cast as a super-refined couple in Paris rather than real-life farmers in St. Martin's, Ontario, but because Haneke, with his infuriating antiseptic style, molded their performances to support a very hands-on act of mercy killing. (Haneke makes tenderness come off as a façade for cruelty.)

I love that Bujold dared to attack that sacred cow "Amour" while promoting "Still Mine. " She brings her characteristic gusto and intuition to the role of Irene Morrison. She and Cromwell, as her devoted spouse Craig Morrison, unselfconsciously challenge every preconception we may have about good country people. They're not just a self-sufficient team who've maintained strong community ties while raising seven now middle-aged kids -- we enjoy them as lusty, engaging individuals. And that's because writer-director Michael McGowan does an honest job of bringing us whisker-close to them.

Bujold's Irene has what used to be called "mother wit." Her daughter contends that tables full of plants in the front yard make the Morrisons look like "trailer trash" who couldn't bother to put in flower beds. Irene thinks of it as "installation art." Craig has a surprising arsenal of verbal weapons to defend their personal values. Cromwell, who played a more taciturn farmer beautifully in "Babe," rises to roughhewn eloquence when Craig proclaims, "Aging is an abstraction, not a straitjacket." And when Craig's daughter asks whether he informed their doctor of Irene's failing memory, he's wittily offhand when he says, "I forgot."

The couple is still close, physically as well as spiritually – as Irene says, they've always been good at the passion part of marriage even though she's entered the first stages of dementia. Craig, determined to do right by her and keep her by his side, decides to build a new one-story house on a piece of his 2,000-acre spread that overlooks a bay. He doesn't realize that he needs to pay state fees and obey state rules and regulations.

Craig's determination to finish the house and stay out of jail before Irene worsens gives the film a sturdy frame. Yet the bureaucratic and legal jousting proves to be the weakest part of the movie, not simply because it's totally one-sided, but also because it's so cursory. Near the end, Craig's lawyer (the estimable Campbell Scott) apologizes for giving him the wrong advice at every turn. That admission brings you up short, since they've only had two or three meetings and the film never lays out an array of strategies.

Still, it's hard not to get caught up in Craig's quest. His crusade is the opposite of quixotic – it's commonsense-ical. Believing that an able craftsman should be able to build what he wants, when he wants, on his own land, doesn't make you a rabid libertarian – just a rational, flexible human being.

The couple's ability to maintain their honor under duress – that's the core of the movie and the glory of Cromwell's and Bujold's performances. Cromwell conveys the physical authority of a man who, as a builder, understands the beauty of clean trusses and true joins. He puts a dozen coats of finish on a table, but in his marriage he prizes unvarnished emotion. His performance has a quiet boldness. He doesn't truckle to the sentimental preconceptions of an audience, so when this man cries at the funeral of a friend, it isn't touching – it's devastating.

Bujold boasts a capacity for making subtle emotions electric – she does more with small shifts of focus and intensity than other actors do with sidelong glances or eagle-eyed stares. She never resorts to shorthand or cliché. She communicates confusion with misguided certainty, not double takes, and she fills even Irene's most desperate moments with plangent emotion.

The way these actors play these parts, the final vignette – Irene, scissors in hand, moving in to trim Craig's hair, and then, forgetting, repeating the exact same words and motions – expresses not pathos, but endless love.